Begin Reading Table of Contents

Shallow Work:
Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These
efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.
In an age of network tools, in other words, knowledge workers increasingly
replace deep work with the shallow alternative—constantly sending and receiving e-
mail messages like human network routers, with frequent breaks for quick hits of
distraction. Larger efforts that would be well served by deep thinking, such as forming
a new business strategy or writing an important grant application, get fragmented into
distracted dashes that produce muted quality. To make matters worse for depth, there’s
increasing evidence that this shift toward the shallow is not a choice that can be easily
reversed. Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you 
permanently
reduce your capacity to perform deep work. “What the Net seems to be doing is
chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation,” admitted journalist
Nicholas Carr, in an oft-cited 2008 
Atlantic
article. “[And] I’m not the only one.”
Carr expanded this argument into a book, 
The Shallows
, which became a finalist for
the Pulitzer Prize. To write 
The Shallows
, appropriately enough, Carr had to move to
a cabin and forcibly disconnect.
The idea that network tools are pushing our work from the deep toward the shallow
is not new. 
The Shallows
was just the first in a series of recent books to examine the
Internet’s effect on our brains and work habits. These subsequent titles include
William Powers’s 
Hamlet’s BlackBerry
, John Freeman’s 
The Tyranny of E-mail
, and
Alex Soojung-Kin Pang’s 
The Distraction Addiction
—all of which agree, more or
less, that network tools are distracting us from work that requires unbroken
concentration, while simultaneously degrading our capacity to remain focused.
Given this existing body of evidence, I will not spend more time in this book trying
to establish this point. We can, I hope, stipulate that network tools negatively impact
deep work. I’ll also sidestep any grand arguments about the long-term societal
consequence of this shift, as such arguments tend to open impassible rifts. On one side
of the debate are techno-skeptics like Jaron Lanier and John Freeman, who suspect
that many of these tools, at least in their current state, damage society, while on the
other side techno-optimists like Clive Thompson argue that they’re changing society,
for sure, but in ways that’ll make us better off. Google, for example, might reduce our
memory, but we no longer 
need
good memories, as in the moment we can now search
for anything we need to know.

---

I have no stance in this philosophical debate. My interest in this matter instead
veers toward a thesis of much more pragmatic and individualized interest: Our work
culture’s shift toward the shallow (whether you think it’s philosophically good or bad)
is exposing a massive economic and personal opportunity for the few who recognize
the potential of resisting this trend and prioritizing depth—an opportunity that, not too
long ago, was leveraged by a bored young consultant from Virginia named Jason Benn.
There are many ways to discover that you’re not valuable in our economy. For Jason
Benn the lesson was made clear when he realized, not long after taking a job as a
financial consultant, that the vast majority of his work responsibilities could be
automated by a “kludged together” Excel script.
The firm that hired Benn produced reports for banks involved in complex deals.
(“It was about as interesting as it sounds,” Benn joked in one of our interviews.) The
report creation process required hours of manual manipulation of data in a series of
Excel spreadsheets. When he first arrived, it took Benn up to six hours per report to
finish this stage (the most efficient veterans at the firm could complete this task in
around half the time). This didn’t sit well with Benn.
“The way it was taught to me, the process seemed clunky and manually intensive,”
Benn recalls. He knew that Excel has a feature called macros that allows users to
automate common tasks. Benn read articles on the topic and soon put together a new
worksheet, wired up with a series of these macros that could take the six-hour process
of manual data manipulation and replace it, essentially, with a button click. A report-
writing process that originally took him a full workday could now be reduced to less
than an hour.
Benn is a smart guy. He graduated from an elite college (the University of Virginia)
with a degree in economics, and like many in his situation he had ambitions for his
career. It didn’t take him long to realize that these ambitions would be thwarted so
long as his main professional skills could be captured in an Excel macro. He decided,
therefore, he needed to increase his value to the world. After a period of research,
Benn reached a conclusion: He would, he declared to his family, quit his job as a
human spreadsheet and become a computer programmer. As is often the case with such
grand plans, however, there was a hitch: Jason Benn had no idea how to write code.
As a computer scientist I can confirm an obvious point: Programming computers is
hard. Most new developers dedicate a four-year college education to learning the
ropes before their first job—and even then, competition for the best spots is fierce.
Jason Benn didn’t have this time. After his Excel epiphany, he quit his job at the
financial firm and moved home to prepare for his next step. His parents were happy he

---

had a plan, but they weren’t happy about the idea that this return home might be long-
term. Benn needed to learn a hard skill, and needed to do so 
fast
.
It’s here that Benn ran into the same problem that holds back many knowledge
workers from navigating into more explosive career trajectories. Learning something
complex like computer programming requires intense uninterrupted concentration on
cognitively demanding concepts—the type of concentration that drove Carl Jung to the
woods surrounding Lake Zurich. This task, in other words, is an act of deep work.
Most knowledge workers, however, as I argued earlier in this introduction, have lost
their ability to perform deep work. Benn was no exception to this trend.
“I was always getting on the Internet and checking my e-mail; I couldn’t stop
myself; it was a compulsion,” Benn said, describing himself during the period leading
up to his quitting his finance job. To emphasize his difficulty with depth, Benn told me
about a project that a supervisor at the finance firm once brought to him. “They wanted
me to write a business plan,” he explained. Benn didn’t know how to write a business
plan, so he decided he would find and read five different existing plans—comparing
and contrasting them to understand what was needed. This was a good idea, but Benn
had a problem: “I couldn’t stay focused.” There were days during this period, he now
admits, when he spent almost every minute (“98 percent of my time”) surfing the Web.
The business plan project—a chance to distinguish himself early in his career—fell to
the wayside.
By the time he quit, Benn was well aware of his difficulties with deep work, so
when he dedicated himself to learning how to code, he knew he had to simultaneously
teach his mind how to go deep. His method was drastic but effective. “I locked myself
in a room with no computer: just textbooks, notecards, and a highlighter.” He would
highlight the computer programming textbooks, transfer the ideas to notecards, and
then practice them out loud. These periods free from electronic distraction were hard
at first, but Benn gave himself no other option: He 
had
to learn this material, and he
made sure there was nothing in that room to distract him. Over time, however, he got
better at concentrating, eventually getting to a point where he was regularly clocking
five or more disconnected hours per day in the room, focused without distraction on
learning this hard new skill. “I probably read something like eighteen books on the
topic by the time I was done,” he recalls.
After two months locked away studying, Benn attended the notoriously difficult
Dev Bootcamp: a hundred-hour-a-week crash course in Web application
programming. (While researching the program, Benn found a student with a PhD from
Princeton who had described Dev as “the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.”)

---

Given both his preparation and his newly honed ability for deep work, Benn excelled.
“Some people show up not prepared,” he said. “They can’t focus. They can’t learn
quickly.” Only half the students who started the program with Benn ended up
graduating on time. Benn not only graduated, but was also the top student in his class.
The deep work paid off. Benn quickly landed a job as a developer at a San
Francisco tech start-up with $25 million in venture funding and its pick of employees.
When Benn quit his job as a financial consultant, only half a year earlier, he was
making $40,000 a year. His new job as a computer developer paid $100,000—an
amount that can continue to grow, essentially without limit in the Silicon Valley
market, along with his skill level.
When I last spoke with Benn, he was thriving in his new position. A newfound
devotee of deep work, he rented an apartment across the street from his office,
allowing him to show up early in the morning before anyone else arrived and work
without distraction. “On good days, I can get in four hours of focus before the first
meeting,” he told me. “Then maybe another three to four hours in the afternoon. And I
do mean ‘focus’: no e-mail, no Hacker News [a website popular among tech types],
just programming.” For someone who admitted to sometimes spending up to 98
percent of his day in his old job surfing the Web, Jason Benn’s transformation is
nothing short of astonishing.
Jason Benn’s story highlights a crucial lesson: Deep work is not some nostalgic
affectation of writers and early-twentieth-century philosophers. It’s instead a skill that
has great value today.
There are two reasons for this value. The first has to do with learning. We have an
information economy that’s dependent on complex systems that change rapidly. Some
of the computer languages Benn learned, for example, didn’t exist ten years ago and
will likely be outdated ten years from now. Similarly, someone coming up in the field
of marketing in the 1990s probably had no idea that today they’d need to master digital
analytics. To remain valuable in our economy, therefore, you must master the art of
quickly learning complicated things. This task requires deep work. If you don’t
cultivate this ability, you’re likely to fall behind as technology advances.
The second reason that deep work is valuable is because the impacts of the digital
network revolution cut both ways. If you can create something useful, its reachable
audience (e.g., employers or customers) is essentially limitless—which greatly
magnifies your reward. On the other hand, if what you’re producing is mediocre, then
you’re in trouble, as it’s too easy for your audience to find a better alternative online.
Whether you’re a computer programmer, writer, marketer, consultant, or entrepreneur,

---

your situation has become similar to Jung trying to outwit Freud, or Jason Benn trying
to hold his own in a hot start-up: To succeed you have to produce the absolute best
stuff you’re capable of producing—a task that requires depth.
The growing necessity of deep work is new. In an industrial economy, there was a
small skilled labor and professional class for which deep work was crucial, but most
workers could do just fine without ever cultivating an ability to concentrate without
distraction. They were paid to crank widgets—and not much about their job would
change in the decades they kept it. But as we shift to an information economy, more
and more of our population are knowledge workers, and deep work is becoming a key
currency—even if most haven’t yet recognized this reality.
Deep work is not, in other words, an old-fashioned skill falling into irrelevance.
It’s instead a crucial ability for anyone looking to move ahead in a globally
competitive information economy that tends to chew up and spit out those who aren’t
earning their keep. The real rewards are reserved not for those who are comfortable
using Facebook (a shallow task, easily replicated), but instead for those who are
comfortable building the innovative distributed systems that run the service (a
decidedly deep task, hard to replicate). Deep work is so important that we might
consider it, to use the phrasing of business writer Eric Barker, “the superpower of the
21st century.”
We have now seen two strands of thought—one about the increasing scarcity of deep
work and the other about its increasing value—which we can combine into the idea
that provides the foundation for everything that follows in this book: